(cheerful music)
- Hello and welcome to St. Petersburg
and to the Salvador Dali museum.
My name is Peter Tush, I'm the curator of education.
And we are pleased to have you here
to experience something truly unique
in the downtown St. Petersburg area,
an international experience of surrealism and beyond.
The reason to come to the museum,
first is to experience this incredibly
transformative architectural experience.
The building itself is an amazing feat
from beginning to end.
It truly is unlike any other building in Florida
and it is a beautiful place
for this collection to be housed.
Second thing would probably be the fact that
we do have the most comprehensive collection
of Salvador Dali's artwork, anywhere in the world.
And as a result, we have some of the most
astounding examples of his accomplishments and achievements
as a surrealist artist, for which he celebrated.
And we also have some of the finest examples
of his large masterworks,
these paintings that started
really from about 1958 through about 1976,
where Dali was painting anywhere up to 13 feet
in his canvases to create these amazing stories.
And so the experience as a visitor is that
there are stories that unfold before you
at every space in our collection.
And then the third thing I think that's really wonderful
is that we have an incredible cafe.
The Cafe Gala provides an opportunity to take a break
from the collection and from the architecture
to have something that's inspired by Spanish cuisine,
to have this really delightful experience
and then dive back into the Dali experience.
So we're here in the James Wing of the Dali museum.
This is where our permanent collection is.
It's a remarkable opportunity to see the development
of one of the most popular artists of the 20th century.
You can see his early formative years,
could see some of the most amazing accomplishments he made
as a surrealist artist, painting what he described as
hand-painted dream photographs.
And you can also see the last four decades of his life
where he explored nuclear mysticism, Catholicism,
strange dream-like stories about history.
So this is called The Hallucinogenic Toreador.
It was painted between 1968 and 1969.
And in a way it's a perfect piece for this collection
because Dali set out to summarize his career.
He was in particular, the hero of many young people
who would gather outside of his house [Indistinct] God
and would wait to see the master.
And in a way, the painting sort of addresses them
as well as trying to impress everybody.
So the painting I'm standing next to
is also one of the most popular paintings in our collection.
It's called The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.
And it's a reference to Dali's 1931 painting,
which has become sort of the symbol of surrealism.
A painting called The Persistence of Memory
that's in the museum of modern art collection.
But here, what you can see is that the melting watches,
which were very fluid in the original one,
seem to be much more like brittle glass.
And the landscape itself has become divided into almost
what, for Dolly, is a metaphor for atomic particles.
It's a complete visit.
It's a complete opportunity to kind of,
give you a delightful, full experience of art,
culture, and then come out refreshed.
(dreamy music)